The Pyramid Texts

First Words Against Death

Earliest record
24th century BCEthe spells carved in the burial chamber and antechamber of the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, around 2350 BCE

From Breasted in 1912 the move from Pyramid to Coffin Texts was read as the afterlife democratised. Mark Smith (2009) concluded it never happened; Hays (2011) found it rested on negative evidence.

Mark Smith, 'Democratization of the Afterlife', UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2009); Harold M. Hays, 'The Death of the Democratisation of the Afterlife', in Strudwick and Strudwick (eds), Old Kingdom, New Perspectives (2011), pp. 115-130.

Spells carved in Old Kingdom royal burial chambers, from Unas around 2350 BCE.

More context

They are cut into the burial chamber and antechamber of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, at Saqqara around 2350 BCE. They appear afterwards in later kings' and queens' pyramids down to Ibi in the Eighth. Gaston Maspero entered the inscribed chambers in 1880–81; Kurt Sethe's edition, from 1908, imposed the 714 spell numbers still cited. They carry the king skyward. He becomes an akh, takes the ladder, and joins the imperishable stars. In them the dead king is addressed as Osiris himself, "Osiris Unis". James Allen's 2005 translation prints each pyramid's spells in the order they were meant to be read, not Sethe's. The Coffin Texts follow, from the First Intermediate Period into the Middle Kingdom, and the Book of the Dead on New Kingdom papyrus. This sequence was long read as the afterlife democratised from king to commoner. Mark Smith and Harold Hays have argued since 2009 that the evidence does not show it.

Light

Egypt's earliest written way past death, believed literally enough that, from Unas's burial chamber on, dangerous signs were carved mutilated.

Shadow

The pyramids drawing esoteric attention have no texts: Giza, read for prophecy by Piazzi Smyth in 1864, mapped onto Orion by Bauval.

Sources10 sources

Primary source

  • R. O. Faulkner (trans.), The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, 1973, 3 vols, 1973-78 (Aris & Phillips)The funerary spells that stand between the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead, beginning in the First Intermediate Period and running through the Middle Kingdom, including the transformation spells.
  • R. O. Faulkner (trans.), ed. Carol Andrews, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, 1985, British Museum PressThat 'Book of the Dead' is a modern title for New Kingdom papyri — the Egyptian is 'Book of Going Forth by Day' — and that its familiar chapter numbers are Lepsius's 1842 numbering of a late Ptolemaic papyrus rather than an ancient canon: the same absence of a fixed sequence that holds for the Pyramid Texts.
  • James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 2005, Writings from the Ancient World 23 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature); 2nd ed. 2015The wording of the corpus; that each pyramid's spells were meant to be read in a specific order, which Allen follows rather than Sethe's numbering; that Unis's corpus was regarded as the most canonical by the Egyptians themselves; and that the dead king is addressed as 'Osiris Unis'.
  • James Henry Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, 1912, p. 91, citing Pyr. §134The Pyramid Texts' own denial of the king's death, addressed to Unas, quoted in the interpretation.

    Thou didst not depart dead, thou didst depart living

Scholarship

  • E. C. Krupp, Pyramid Marketing Schemes, 1997, Sky & Telescope 93, no. 2 (February 1997), p. 64The astronomical objection to the Orion correlation: the bend in the Giza line runs north and the kink in Orion's Belt runs south, so the two match only if the map of Egypt is inverted — which The Orion Mystery does without saying so, while the Great Pyramid's shafts show that for its builders north meant north.
  • Erik Hornung (trans. David Lorton), The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, 2001, Cornell University PressPyramidology and the wider Egyptosophy line — the reading of prophecy and cosmic measure from the uninscribed Giza monuments, from John Taylor (1859) and Charles Piazzi Smyth (1864) onward — as a modern European construction rather than an Egyptian one.
  • Jan Assmann (trans. David Lorton), Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, 2005, Cornell University PressEgyptian conceptions of the constituents of the person — ba, ka, akh, name and shadow — and the theology of transfiguring the dead that the pyramid spells enact.
  • Mark Smith, Democratization of the Afterlife, 2009, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich; open access at escholarship.org, item 70g428wjSmith argues that no democratization of the afterlife took place in the First Intermediate Period — the change the theory describes is not visible in the evidence — and makes the case on different grounds from earlier dissenters.
  • Harold M. Hays, The Death of the Democratisation of the Afterlife, 2011, in Nigel Strudwick and Helen Strudwick (eds), Old Kingdom, New Perspectives: Egyptian Art and Archaeology 2750-2150 BC (Oxford: Oxbow), pp. 115-130Hays argues that the democratisation theory rests on negative evidence — the absence of non-royal funerary texts before the First Intermediate Period — and traces the theory's own history in earlier Egyptology.
  • Barbara Russo, 'La vipère à cornes sans tête. Étude paléographique et considérations historiques', BIFAO 110, 2010, pp. 251-274, at p. 252That mutilated hieroglyphs are first attested in Unas's burial chamber, and that early snake signs were made headless, the detached head coming later.